On Wed, Jun 14, 2000 at 06:22:26PM +0000, Ben Armstrong wrote:
> person a: "I support the GR."
> person a: "I'm going to quit the project if the GR does go through
> because the project no longer cares about its users!"
Hmmm....
> I personally believe that if this is what keeping non-free in our archives
> is going to do to the project, than we had better dump it, and fast. Unity
> in the project is far more important than continuing to support non-free
> as a "favor" to our users.
Why will we be any more `unified' in either case? I guess if you expect
everyone who supports non-free to quit the project, that could work. Or
maybe if you think that the non-free supporters are reasonable people
and will accept the consequences of the vote, and that the people against
non-free are unreasonable, and will continue to agitate for change even
if the vote fails, well, then you'd also have a case.
A differenet question: how are we unified at the moment? We all agree to
uphold the social contract, and to support the DFSG.
Except that now we're (or some of us are) trying to change the social
contract.
How can that *not* be divisive? How can you possibly argue that it should
succeed precisely because of that divisiveness?
> It is not worth it. It does nothing now but
> cause strife and division.
Well, that and provide useful software for at least thousands of users. But
politics over features, right?
> The whole issue has escalated from what should have
> been a simple correction to remove ambiguity from our goals into a
> full-scale nuclear war of words.
Except that it's not a "correction". What we've already got isn't *wrong*,
so it doesn't need to be corrected.
The result of this proposal *may* be better than what we currently have,
but that's what we're trying to debate. Declaring it a "correction", or
"the moral thing to do", as if what we're already doing is immoral or
incorrect isn't helpful.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``We reject: kings, presidents, and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and working code.''
-- Dave Clark
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